← Honestly with Bari Weiss
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- [00:03]
A
From the Free Press, this is honestly and I'm Bari Weiss. Do you feel uneasy? Do you feel a level of ambient anxiety or maybe despair, despite the fact that we technically live in the most luxurious time and place in human history? Did my producer offer to give me a Klonopin yesterday? That one I'm not gonna answer. The point is, if you feel these things, you're not crazy. You're simply attuned to reality. And it's not a problem that's solvable with less screen time, meditation or CMOS treatments. My brilliant guest today, Paul Kingsnorth, argues that the reason you're feeling this way is not this or that social media app or algorithm or culture war issue, that these are superficial expressions of a thousand year battle with what he calls the Machine. Now, what exactly that means you'll hear in this conversation. To personally fight the machine, Paul has moved his family out of urban England to live off the land in rural Ireland, where his family grows their own food, draws their water from a well, and they homeschool their children. To learn more about his fascinating life, you'll have to go back and listen to the Honestly episode that I did with him back in 2024. In his new book, against the Machine, Paul makes the argument that what this moment in history requires is something of a rebellion. He says, and this is radical, that the west is not dying but already dead. And this book is an attempt to understand how it died and how we got to this profound feeling of disquiet and more, how we might actually return to true peace. The book is being billed as a spiritual manual for dissidents in the technological age. There are few people in the world who write and think the way Paul does. One word for it is wild, and I think another word for it is extreme. And I mean that in the best sense of the word. He represents sort of the full flower of a particular worldview. And in talking to him, it challenges you, or at least it challenges me to ask myself about my own positions. This is his 10th book. I've read a few of his others and I highly recommend his amazing substack.
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B
His.
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A
You can check it out and it's why I'm always thrilled to speak with him. We recorded this as a live free press conversation at Redeemer Church in Manhattan.
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B
And it was an incredible event.
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A
A quick break and we'll be right back with Paul Kings North. Honestly is proudly supported by the Jack Miller Center. At a time when our democracy faces real challenges, we. One question matters more than ever. Are we preparing the next generation to understand and uphold the principles that define America. At the Jack Miller center, they believe the answer begins in the classroom. Their mission is bold to revive the teaching of America's founding ideals, documents and history on college campuses, in K12 schools and beyond. Since 2004, the Jack Miller center has built a national network of over 1300 scholars who are bringing the American political tradition to life for students across across the country. And through their Teach for Freedom campaign, they're working to reach millions more by 2026, our nation's 250th anniversary. Why? Because a strong democracy depends on informed citizens. The Free Press is really proud to partner with the Jack Miller center on Old School, a new podcast about how great books can change your life, hosted by the brilliant Shiloh Brooks. To learn more about their work or to get involved, visit jackmillercenter.org Again, that's Jackmiller Center. Or. Now.
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B
I'm so thrilled to welcome up to the stage the writer, the author and the wild man in so many ways. Please join me in welcoming Paul Kingsborough.
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C
I don't think I've ever been introduced as a wild man before.
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B
I think it's accurate, don't you?
- [04:20]
C
Well, I've got my special New York jacket on your jacket, so I'm not feeling very wild.
- [04:24]
B
It's like it's sort of a costume. But nothing can sort of cloak the truth about your mind, which is it's wild. And it's one of the reasons that I love reading you. This is your 10th book, this new book, against the Machine on the unmaking of humanity, which we're gonna talk about tonight. It's your 10th book, but I've read several of your books and I am a devotee and if you guys are not readers yet of Paul's incredible substack the Abbey of Misrule, I cannot recommend it more highly. I know I'm supposed to be just promot promoting the Free Press tonight, but highly recommend Paul's work. And the book is being billed, I think accurately as a spiritual manual for dissidents in the digital age. And as I mentioned, Paul is wild in the way he lives and the kinds of things he writes. And I'm so excited to be here tonight. So, Paul, I wondered if you could open to the introduction to your book and read a little bit for us, the part that culminates in this poem by I think it's RS Thomas to maybe ground people in what this new work is all about.
- [05:28]
C
Yeah, I certainly can. So the introduction I mean, I should probably put this in context. This book is probably, as I say in the introduction, the kind of the culmination of about 30 years of work. It's a kind of magnum opus. So if it's, you know, if you want to ask me what I think, it's all in here. If it's wrong, it's wrong for possibility in here. I've been thinking about this thing I've been calling the machine, the society we live in. The kind of forces that are coalescing around us for decades. And this is an attempt to put it all into one place. And so what I've done in the introduction to the book is I've tried to take it back to other writers who inspired me and also tried to lay out what I actually mean, what this intuition is that I have here. So just this little section here is really talking about what's being lost as a result of what I think is a unique time we're living in. So it's just a short section from the first chapter. Most of the things you like are fading away. The great forests and the stories made in and by them. The strange cultures spanning centuries of time. The little pubs and the curious uninhabited places. The thrumming temples and dark marshlands and crooked villages and folk tales and conviviality and spontaneous song and old houses which might have witches in them. The possibility of dragons. The empty beaches and wild hilltops. The chance of getting lost in the rain forever or discovering something that was never on any map. A world without maps, a world without engines. This world you can see is on the way out, if it's not already long gone. The one that is manifesting to replace it is a left brain paradise, all straight lines and concrete car parks where the Corn Exchange used to be. The future is stem and chatbots and cashless parking meters and economic growth and asteroid mining forever and ever. There is no arguing with it. You can feel the great craters that it makes in the world. You can feel what is being tarmac'd and neatened and rationalized into oblivion and the depth of what is leaving. But you cannot explain or justify it in the terms which are now the terms we live by. You just know that something is wrong. Everybody tells you that you feel like this because you are infected with something called nostalgia, or that you picked up a dose of Luddism or romanticism at a party or in a doctor's waiting room. Basically, there's something wrong with you. You just don't understand progress, which is always and everywhere a good thing. But you can feel something going on that is not a good thing. And it doesn't matter how many lies, damned lies, or statistics are produced to prove otherwise. You can feel this something enveloping you. The Welsh poet RS Thomas described it chillingly in his poem Other. In a verse I've never forgotten since I first read it, the machine appeared in the distance, singing to itself of money. Its song was the web. They were caught in, men and women together. The. The villages were as flies to be sucked empty. God secreted a tear. Enough, enough. He commanded. But the machine looked at him and went on singing.
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B
I want you, if you can, to define the machine. What is the machine? Is the machine just modernity and industrialization and, and the digital age that we're living through is only the most recent manifestation of it? How far does one go back to define the machine in the way that you're defining it?
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C
Okay, so this is the question I spent 368 pages trying to work out the answer to. So I'll just sum it up in a second.
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B
Buy the book.
- [09:14]
C
Yeah, obviously, buy the book is the answer. So one of the reasons I start the book by talking about other writers who've used this term, including iris Thomas, including D.H. lawrence, including George Orwell, including Mary Shelley. You can trace artists and writers and poets and filmmakers back 200 years to least the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Talking about using this phrase the machine, because it's the best image they can come up with to describe a very mechanistic society which is based on logic, which is based on reason, which is based on science, which is dismissive of intuition, which is dismissive of religion, and which ultimately is moving us towards a world in which nature is going to be replaced by technology. So the machine is not simply the sum total of all the technologies we have. It's not just the smartphones and the robot lawnmowers and the cars and all of the things that have evolved very, very quickly since say, the Industrial Revolution or the Scientific Revolution. They're a manifestation of something deeper, which is, I think, a way of seeing. So the best way to describe it is probably that it's a way of seeing the world. I think it probably rises and falls throughout human history. There's a section in the book in which I talk about Lewis Mumford, the great critic of technology from the 1960s, wrote a two volume book called the Myth of the Machine. He traces it back to Pharaonic Egypt. He talks about the society that could build the pyramids being a machine like Society because you have to have a mechanistic top down system in which you have a machine made of human parts, the human parts being slaves. So it's a way of seeing which is, as I say, rationalistic, technological, et cetera, et cetera. But since the Scientific revolution and the Enlightenment and the Industrial revolution and the period of political revolution, which all of which really start in the 18th century, we in the west have rushed headlong away from a much more universal, traditional way of seeing, which was very religious, which was rooted in place, which had human scale cultures, and into a much more top down, technological, rationalistic way of seeing, which ultimately manifests in where we are now, which is the cusp of the age of artificial intelligence. And we're moving towards a point where we are effectively trying to create machines which will be greater than us, terraform and control the Earth, create a society in which humans are at the top of a pyramid of technological control, where everything is manifested and measured through the use of reason and science, and everything that can't be understood that way is pushed to the side as superstition or woo woo, or just something you do in the church or the synagogue on a Sunday, not the stuff of serious people. That's the regime we've been living in for the last, who knows, x hundred years. And I think what we're seeing now is the results of it. We're seeing the results both in terms of all the technologies we love, which give us benefits, and all the rest of it. We know what those are. The fact that we can go to the moon, we can drive around in cars, we can play on the Internet, we can fly about the world. We're also seeing a changing climate, a mass extinction, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, collapsing cultures, the culture war in the west, which is a manifestation of a collapsing culture as well. So it feels to me like we're being enveloped by something which has been building up, which initially we started creating, which is now controlling us. And we feel like we're cogs in it, as you said at the beginning. And it's difficult to pin down that feeling, but it's a feeling that everybody has more and more so all the time, because it's now almost impossible to function without the digital manifestation of this thing. Try functioning without a smartphone or an Internet connection. It's harder and harder all the time.
- [12:32]
B
Well, we'll get to that because you sort of do it. And I think people will leave this talk wondering how they can, if they feel compelled by the argument you're making, resist the machine in Some way you write early in the book, a huge change is birthing itself. A change in the human relationship with nature, with our past, with our tools, with everything. Again, I'm just explain the change as you understand it, because the change has been going on for a very long time.
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C
Yeah.
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B
So is it that the speed of change is just so profound right now? Is it that the web itself is so tight as you've just to use the metaphor, you just brought out, like, why does it feel so much more urgent right now?
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C
I spent quite a lot of time in this book trying to work out if there really is a distinction between, say, a pre modern culture and a modern one, a machine culture and a non machine culture. And if there is, what's the difference? And is there a point at which it changes from one to the other? And I think actually there's just a succession of points over time. I think you can point to particular inflection points in history. The Industrial Revolution is an obvious one. The Scientific Revolution is an obvious one. The Enlightenment, the Reformation perhaps, at which our way of thinking actually changes. Well, initially the elite's way of thinking changes and then that starts to filter down to society. So, I mean, I come up with a little formula at one point in the book which I call the four P's, which is my attempt to define the basis of what most traditional societies are around the world, whatever culture they're from. And these four P's are people, place, prayer and the past. Right. So most societies at most times, I think, have been built on those four legs, like four legs of a table. So you have your people, whoever that is, your community, your group of people, your ethnic or cultural group, or just your neighborhood group, the people that you live amongst, who are your people, who you know and whose community you're part of. Then you have place. That's the place in which you are rooted. Maybe you come from there, maybe you've arrived there, but it's the place you were in and it's your connection to nature as well. Usually before the age of megacities, most people until this century actually were living in the countryside. So they had a closer connection to that. Then you have prayer, which is your connection to God. And there may be different ways of doing that, but there's no society in history that has not had that. And then you have the past, which is your sense that you come from somewhere, you have ancestors and you're going somewhere as well. You're in a stream of some sort of cultural stream that's moving forward and even if it's changing and developing, you have no sense of coming from some sort of tradition. And I think those four legs are more or less the basis on which all traditional cultures are built. And if you measure them against what, say, a modern society looks like in the west today, most of those are being knocked away. So we don't have very much interest in the past at the moment. Although partly the current culture war is about that, right? How we actually talk about the past and how we relate to it. We have lived under a regime for a long time. Certainly where I come from, in Britain, where we've been told that religion is a dead thing that we used to do, that we don't do anymore because we have science instead. We are very rootless in terms of simply either living in very urbanized, unnatural environments or simply just having to move around endlessly to follow work. We don't have. Very few of us sort of live in the place where our ancestors come from or anything like that. I certainly don't. And in terms of who your people are, well, that's a contested discussion as well. But again, if everyone's moving around all over the place, there's no sense that you're in a cultural stream. So all of those things are knocked up. All of them become rootless. All of us are uprooted by this thing which is now global and has been global for a long time. And the age of empires, of course, the European empires, takes this way of seeing globally, takes capitalism global. It takes the technological development that comes from that, global as well. And so you end up with a way of a being that is very rootless and a way of seeing that certainly in the modern period, and I think the 18th century is quite key, accelerates it rapidly because we start to sort of fight a war on our own past. So you could say that, say, revolutionary politics in France and Russia and elsewhere is systematically designed to rip up the past and replace it with a utopian way of seeing. Much of modern politics, certainly on the left, is like that. But we also have capitalism, which is a hugely radical and revolutionary economic system which creates enormous wealth, but also enormous destruction and uprootedness. And then you have this sense that the Enlightenment gives us a kind of war against God. We just push that away. We say, we don't need God, we don't need religion. There is no God. It can't be proved. We can't see God down the microscope. We have a different way of measuring now. We have the scientific process, and that becomes a way of seeing as well. So we see science not simply as a method of discovering how things work and how things fit together, but we see it as method of understanding the world. And we say, well, if science can't measure it, it doesn't exist. And so here we are. I think that we're in a strange period in time because we have this way of seeing, which is unprecedented, but we don't really know how to live with it. So actually we have a need for those four Ps. People have a need for roots, they have a need for community, they have a need for nature, they have a need for God, however, they understand that. And it took me most of my life to realize I needed those things. And most people need those things in some way.
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B
They're just basically just for people who stumbled in here. You didn't have many. You certainly didn't have the prayer part for huge parts of your life. You were a Buddhist at one. I mean, you were a Wiccan, you were a Buddha, you were a searcher.
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C
I was searching all over the place. Yeah. Well, I mean, I grew up in urban England in the 1980s in a very ordinary sort of lower middle class suburban house, perfectly good upbringing, loving parents, certainly no religion, didn't have a need for it, didn't have an interest in it, and just grew up with all of these assumptions I've just talked about kind of percolating around me really. And like a lot of people, I just grew up and realized that didn't work. And I had this sense, which it still comes out in this book. At the age of 52, I had this sense when I was about five probably that there was something wrong with the world, that there was something missing that I could sense. And I saw it in other places in the world I went to later on in my life. I saw people with a sense of community. I saw people attached to nature. I saw people with religions they believed in. And I thought, something's missing here.
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B
Well, you also saw it. You write in books that you read in Tolkien and others.
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C
Absolutely. And also in the poets and in the history books I was reading, I understood that something had changed. I think the important thing to say probably is that I think we're living in a revolutionary time. Not just in political churning and all the stuff that's going on at the moment, but in terms of the way that we see the world. There's a lot of other writers I talk about in this book because I'm trying to draw on a tradition of people who've Been trying to analyze this machine in poetry and fiction, in nonfiction, for decades and for centuries now. One of the more recent writers, the current writers are drawn, is Ian McGilchrist. And Iain McGilchrist, who some people may have heard of, is a psychiatrist and a philosopher who's done a huge amount of work on brain science. And he's been trying to understand how this modern way of seeing actually maps out onto the brain and his way of seeing this, his way of understanding it. And if you read his recent book, the footnotes at the end are longer than this whole book, so he knows what he's talking about.
- [19:34]
B
Convince the skeptical person sitting in this room that, you know, isn't it just the nature of being human, that everyone, in any time longs for a simpler age? Call it nostalgia, call it romanticism, call it whatever feels that something's come unmoored and undone, longs for the past. Isn't that just part of being human? And we could pluck someone out of the 800s and pluck someone out of the 1300s, and they would have felt exactly the same way.
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C
I think it's quite possibly true to some degree, because you can look at any of the myths of the world, you can look at the religious stories of the world, and there's often a sense that there was a golden age. If we talk about Christianity, we have a garden that we fell out of. Right? So in that sense, it's true. Yes, it's easy to say, well, things were better at a certain point in time, but that's not really the case. I'm trying to make. I'm not pointing to a particular period in history and saying, well, everything was wonderful here. Let's live like that. There isn't a period in which everything was wonderful. But I think that the modern period is unique in the way that it divorces us from these quite primal things. And it's technology that allows us to do this. It's these revolutions in our way of seeing that have allowed us to do this. We see nature, I think, in a fundamentally different way to the way our ancestors saw nature. I think we see community and we see religion in a different way. We can't do anything about that because we've come through modernity. Our minds are different. We don't have the same minds people had in the Middle Ages, for better or for worse. And there's plenty of ways of seeing in the middle 80s. We wouldn't want to go back to and reproduce anyway. So we don't have to romanticize that period. But I think what's dangerous, fundamentally dangerous, about the age we're living in is that we've divorced ourselves from everything that actually fundamentally makes us human at a deep level. And although there are still plenty of wonderful things in life and we have all the tech, and we also, you know, there's. There's plenty of flourishing human life around, we're moving in a direction which is taking us further and further away from those things and which is ensnaring us deeper and deeper in this digital web that makes it harder to control our own destinies and gives me certainly a strong sense that we're being pushed towards something which is very alien and very unsettling. And if you look at the actual. And again, there's a few chapters on this in the book, you look at the actual stories that the people creating this world are telling, especially the people creating the technology. They're deeply unsettling and quite religious, curiously.
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B
Say more about that.
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C
Well, there's a couple of chapters in the book which are probably the strangest and most controversial chapters in which I talk about AI and I talk about the Internet and the digital revolution and start to actually ask, what are these things? AI fascinates me. Artificial intelligence has been under development since the 1950s, and it's accelerating now. And if you actually listen to the people who've been building this stuff for a long time, starting right back in the 50s, and what they say that they're doing, and you listen to them now and what they say that they're doing, you see two things. The first thing you see is, at the moment, most of the people who are warning us about the dangers of artificial intelligence are the people creating it. And I've never seen this situation before, with the possible exception of Oppenheimer and the atom bomb. You've got people out there telling us, for example, Geoffrey Hinton, the British godfather of AI, recently gave an interview just a few weeks ago in which he said that he thought that there was probably a 20% chance that AI would lead to total human extinction. And he said that in a very sort of nice plummy English accent. So it sounded quite unthreatening. But I'm terribly sorry about this. He said, it won't be nice. I do apologize. Have a cup of tea. But these guys are all saying this. So the people creating these things are frightened by them. And the second thing you see, if you get to the higher level and you listen to the people developing them and you ask them what they're doing, they all have a religious Vision. They say they're building God. They say they're making God. Ray Kurzweil, who is the great prophet of the Singularity, works at Google now, once was asked, does God exist? And he said, not yet. The book is full of quotes from these people. Actually, there was an interview in the New York Times a while back, I think it was last year, and Ezra Klein went and talked to a load of people who were developing AI and he asked them, given that you are warning us about the dangers of these things and yet you're creating them at the same time, what is it that you think you're doing? And they couldn't answer the question. They didn't really know why they were doing it. But he said the general sense he had was that they felt an obligation to usher this new intelligence into the world. So you've got a bunch of people who are doing something which is almost openly religious, talking about making God, talking about uploading their minds, talking about building God, talking about ushering in new intelligences at the same time as they're scared of it. And that's a manifestation of this whole march of machine modernity where we've got to the point where having controlled much of the natural world, having abolished nature's hold over us, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, having dug out and burned up the fossil fuels, having gone to the moon, having colonized so much of the world, we're now doing what CS Lewis said would be the inevitable endpoint of this. He said the last part of nature to fall to man will be human nature, and then the battle will be won. But who exactly will have won it? So the end point of a war against nature and its replacement with technology and reason and science, et cetera, is the conquest of human nature and the replacement of humanity, which is what these people are now openly talking about. So it's a very strange, very pseudo religious, very frightening path that we're on, I think. I don't know exactly where it goes, but that's why I say it's revolutionary. I think it's a completely revolutionary and radical way of thinking, and I feel like we're all being swept along with it.
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B
If it's so revolutionary, why does it feel like people are sleepwalking in this moment?
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C
It's a funny thing. I think there's two things going on. So firstly, I don't know whether we're sleepwalking exactly, because if you ask almost anyone, they have a sense of not being very happy about the progress of things. I mean, ask people if they're happy to give their children a smartphone to play on all day. Ask people if they're happy with the effects of these phones on teenagers. Most people actually feel a bit disturbed by it.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Right. I don't see many people who at some level are doing it. But you're doing it. They're doing it because everyone else is doing it. Right. And they're doing it because you don't have a choice other than to do it. So, you know, my mother in law, who came from India originally and lives in England now, lives a very simple life, has recently had to get an iPad because she can no longer walk down the street to the post office every week to collect her pension and chat with the people in the post office because you can't do that anymore. You have to do it online, you have to do your banking online, et cetera. Everybody is being railroaded into the system which has just emerged very quickly over the last 10 or 15 years. So I don't exactly know if we're sleepwalking. I think we're just being pushed into it and everybody else is in it as well. People don't necessarily like it, but they just assume it's progress. Well, that's just the way of the world. That's what I think is happening. I was going to say something else very profound, but I've forgotten it.
- [26:34]
B
Okay.
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C
It might come back though.
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B
I'm sure for people who are hearing you and trying to make sense of sort of like the Paul Kingsnorthian worldview, you could pick out some of what you're saying and say, well, he's kind of anti woke. And then you could pick out something else and say, well, he sounds really anti capitalist, very religious. How would you kind of characterize? Because to me it goes back to the machine. Right. You could say that the machine is about sort of a post industrial age specific way of being that you're criticizing. But equally, there's parts of what you write and what you say, both in this book and more broadly in your writing, that feels like the machine is almost human. Desire for power and money and greed and the kinds of things that are a little bit, I think alluded to in that poem, help people that are just coming to your work make sense of how it all fits together.
- [27:27]
C
It is hard because I'm still trying to make sense of it myself and trying to make sense of myself. But for me, I mean, much of this comes from an intuition. Okay. So I can back up my intuition with all the arguments and the facts and the stats that are in the book. But it comes from that intuition I had when I was 5 years old that there's something wrong with things. And what's wrong with things is that there is. It feels like there's a sort of war against humanity going on. But I think you're absolutely right to say that it comes from inside us. So this desire for, say, total control over nature, this desire for. This desire obviously for profit and stuff and wealth, there's nothing new about that. This desire to kind of rationalize and control things, this very particular way of seeing which wants to cut itself clean from the past and start a new world of kind of equality and justice and growth. That's all sort of in here somewhere. And I think that in the culture that we've built over the last few hundred years in Europe, it's been unleashed for better and for worse, right? So it's a mixed bag. But we have built this thing that's come from within us. I mean, I think the way it works is, is that different cultures give vent to give access, give succor to different tendencies within us. So you can build a culture that say, like medieval Christendom looks at the seven deadly sins and says, these things are bad things, right? Pride, lust, greed, sloth, envy. You should try to move beyond those things in your life. You should try to suppress them. Society should try to discourage them. We're living in a society now where the seven deadly sins are monetized. They're basically the basis of capitalism. I mean, you can look at lust, greed, envy, sloth, wrath, et cetera. Every single one of them will get you clicks, and every single one of them is profitable. I mean, 90% of Internet traffic is pornography. So there's the sin of lust right there. And it's highly profitable. So a society could decide what it's going to bring out within us. And the society that we're in now is in this kind of this accelerating loop where technology is encouraging more and more of a certain way of seeing. But I think I have a feeling that it's driven us to the point where it's slightly driving us mad and we're in some way rebelling against it. Because I don't think people feel comfortable with it. I mean, some do. But I'm always also very struck by the way that so many people in Silicon Valley who are creating these technologies send their children to Steiner schools and don't let them have screens or laptops or phones. So again, if this is so terrific, you know what's happening there. So, yeah, I think it absolutely does come with. Come from within us, which is why I end up really concluding it's, you know, there's a politics involved, there's an economics, but ultimately it's a spiritual issue. It's a matter of how we relate to nature, to God, to community, to ourselves, and how we. How we relate to these things that we've created.
- [30:16]
A
After the break, more with Paul Kingsnorth.
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B
I want to pick up on your sort of criticism of the Enlightenment as being only about reason. And so most people, I think, walking around Manhattan in 2025, think of the Enlightenment as sort of an unadulterated good. I want you to explain how you see it and also how the sort of death of religion and the turn away from God is core to sort of allowing the flourishing of what you call the machine.
- [30:56]
C
Well, there were a lot of different Enlightenments. I mean, America's an Enlightenment society, right? This country comes from the Enlightenment. So it's generally quite popular. I'm not trying to make a case that the Enlightenment is a bad thing and it shouldn't have happened, but what you get in the 18th century is a lot of different trends that kind of converge and explode in this particular way of seeing. So from that comes, say, political liberalism and a desire to prevent tyrannical government, which generally is good. I would think we would probably agree in the broadest sense. From that comes a sense of equality which says, let's abolish the slave trade and women should be equal to men. And again, most people generally consider these to be good things, I would hope, in the modern world. But what also comes from that is, and this is quite interesting, the way it develops is that the scientific revolution, which happens more or less the same time or perhaps slightly before, initially develops as a way of understanding God's creation. So most of the people involved in the scientific revolution in the Enlightenment were Christians. They were religious people. They weren't trying to abolish God. There were very few atheists. They came later. But they decided that the world could be measured out and unraveled and that we could deal with everything through the use of reason. So rather than seeing reason as a tool, this is to go back to Ian McGilchrist, actually. Rather than seeing reason and science as tools which could serve our broad intuition and our way of seeing the world, the parts serve the whole our understanding of the big picture, we almost overthrow the big picture. We get to the point where this thing has a momentum of its own, and we end up saying, well, science can't demonstrate the existence of God, and so that falls out of the picture. And science can't demonstrate the existence of many of the things that we actually consider to be important, from love to human community. And it's almost as if, without thinking and by accident, talking about sleepwalking, we end up walking into this society in which the Enlightenment on steroids has told us that if something isn't rationally explicable and scientifically measurable, then it isn't a real thing. And we've also moved away from a sense where we have a shared religious vision or a shared understanding of God or a connection to nature, because we've all moved into the cities. And it's a revolution almost by stealth. So we get this way of seeing which effectively blanks out everything else, and that's where we are now. And having said that, I think it's turning back in on itself because it's become very clear that that way of seeing is missing out a huge way, a huge amount of what it actually means to be human. So, again, it's not that everything that happens at that point is bad and should be overthrown. It's that it overthrows everything else that actually should be coming up against it. It overthrows the big picture. It overthrows the deep meaning of things and is only able to measure the parts. So it's almost like having a half of your brain missing. You know, that's where we've ended up at its most extreme.
- [33:47]
B
You're coming to America at a really particular moment after the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the discussion about a religious revival, both in America, but also in France and other places around the west, has been, for those of us paying attention, has been a conversation for 10 years now, maybe even longer. That conversation has become supercharged over the past several weeks. There's also been targeted violence against not just Charlie Kirk, but this Mormon church in Michigan. Four people killed. Talk to us about how you see the question of revival. If you see a revival happening, what is the nature of that revival? And is it a reaction to the things that you're describing in this book?
- [34:33]
C
Well, yeah, that's a really big question. So, I mean, as far as I can see, there are two slightly separate but related things going on. So firstly, there is. Because people have a sense that this thing called the west is crumbling away, that culture's under threat. There's a cultural battle going on. Obviously, it's been going on for a long time about what. What the meaning of a country is, what the meaning of the west is who we are. All this stuff, which I think, and I talk about this in the book, is actually a result of the advancement of machine society. It's the result of this many centuries of us all being uprooted and chucked about so that we don't have a shared culture. So we're all fighting about it. You have a culture war when you don't have a culture anymore. That's what I think is going on. It took me quite a while to work that out. I worked it out in the means of writing, in the midst of writing this book. And I thought, oh, yeah, that's what's going on.
- [35:20]
B
You also have a really clever thing where you talk about the word cult being inside of culture.
- [35:25]
C
Yeah. I mean, I'm stuck with the fact I live in rural Ireland and I have neighbors who are in their 80s, and they're just Irish people. They've lived there all their lives. They go to the Catholic Church. If I sat down and asked them what their identity is, they would have no idea what I was talking about. Right. It would mean absolutely nothing to them. Yes, they're Irish, yes, they're Catholic. But because they've just had this very particular life in a particular place, they're not having a culture war. Cause they don't have to even think about what their culture is. You only have to think about your culture, what it is, who's threatening it, where you come from, what you want your country to be when everything's in turmoil already. Which is a result, I think, of this long process of uprooting and churning and kind of radical rethinking of what it means to be human. So there's kind of a couple of things going on, and they are related. And I think one of them is political. There's a rise in political religion, kind of Christian nationalism and other forms of political religion, Islamic radicalism, for example, in which religion is almost a tool for kind of saving the culture.
- [36:16]
A
Right.
- [36:16]
C
So you say, well, the west used to be Christian, so let's all become Christians so we can save the West. So religion becomes a political tool or a cultural tool. You take your nationalism and you paint a cross on it, and that's quite dangerous. And also it doesn't work because that's not what a religion is. But there's also a genuine spiritual hunger with a lot of people. I mean, I became an Orthodox Christian five years ago. I didn't see that on my bingo card, I have to say. And lots of other people I know didn't either. And I know there's a lot of people going back to a lot of different types of, of church, especially young people, especially young men. And some of those guys might be culture warriors, at least initially, but if they are, they'll fade away. But most of them aren't, actually. Most of them have a spiritual hunger because we have a need for meaning and because this machine that we have built has told us that there is no transcendent meaning anymore. There's no God, there's nothing bigger than that. Or even if there is, you can't prove it, so don't worry about it. Meaning is created here. Meaning is created through progress, through, through growth, through technology, through your career, through your individual, all these things that you can gain in your life. And obviously that doesn't work beyond a certain point. There might be fun in your 20s, but actually I think humans have a religious call. And that's why the guys in Silicon Valley, by the way, are effectively creating a kind of technological religion, even in the language that they use. Because we have a religious way of understanding the world. We're always moving towards some transcendent God. And I think people are looking for God now. People like me and people younger than me who grew up without it, in an age of technology, in an age of so called progress, which actually isn't progressing in a direction they want to go in, are saying, well, look, maybe there was something in these old stories after all. So there's those two trends, the kind of Christian nationalism, the Christian or just the religious civilizationism can be very dangerous and is also a dead end. But the actual search for meaning is a real thing, and that's. Even Richard Dawkins is talking about being a cultural Christian. There's going to be a deathbed conversion, definitely. We're all waiting for that. But you know, it's just, it's a very.
- [38:17]
B
Can you just give us a few more lines, if you don't mind, on the difference between sincere spiritual hunger and nationalism with the cross painted on top of it? How can we discern the difference between.
- [38:28]
C
It's kind of difficult to know what your motives are. You know, it's difficult for us to even know what our own motives are. But I think that there's a narrative. I gave a talk actually here in New York City about 18 months ago, called Against Christian Civilization, which annoyed a few Christians and made some other ones happy.
- [38:44]
B
I wonder why.
- [38:45]
C
Yeah, well, I mean, the point I was trying to make was if you start off the question, if the question you're asking is okay, and actually this is almost the question I started writing this book with, is like, why does the culture appear to be collapsing? Why is there a culture war happening? Why are all these battles going on? What's at the root of it? Because once you actually dig down below the surface of the woke versus the based, you see something going on which as I say, is a deeply insecure culture which doesn't know what it is, which doesn't have a sense of shared meaning, and dig down, dig down, dig down below the ideologies and the economics and the culture, all of which matter. But you get to a spiritual question. What's the meaning of life? What does it mean to be a human? Is there a God? Where are we going? All the really big old questions that everyone has always asked, which this society doesn't have an ability to answer. So this culture can do, modern culture can do all sorts of incredible things that we could never do before, some of which are good and some of which are bad. We all have this great technological abundance, but it doesn't solve the question of meaning. It deliberately ignores it or attempts to technologize it. So if the question you're starting with is, I think my culture, Western culture, or America or England or whatever it is, is collapsing, then you dig down and you say, well, what was this culture? And you say, oh well, look, it had a Christian root to was built on Christianity. So therefore we need to revive Christianity in order to revive the culture. You're starting from the wrong way, from the wrong place. If a Christian culture develops, it's because there were Christians there and they did Christian things based on Christian love, like building hospitals or helping the poor or staying in cities after there were earthquakes there, or abolishing the slave trade or building great cathedrals to their God which were full of beauty. And the Christian culture suffuses out from that and it starts to influence the people, it influences the king. You get a kind of a Christian culture and, or civilization built on that, but you can't build it again if you don't have the belief at the center. You know, you see a lot of people around at the moment going, well, I don't really believe in any of this Christian stuff, but it's like a utilitarian. Maybe we should just go to church because it'll help us create that culture again. Well, it won't. It's a falsehood. You're starting from the wrong way around. You're trying to build the structure without the belief at the center has to start from the belief.
- [41:03]
B
But that's asking a lot of people.
- [41:05]
C
Well, it isn't really, because you start off with a question you don't have to. When people say, go back to church, or maybe they go back to synagogue or whatever they're going to. It's not like you have to turn up with a fully formed belief. You turn up with a question. That's what I did. It's not like there's someone on the door saying, well, can you recite the Nicene Creed? And you can't come in if you don't. You go and you say, well, I wonder if there's anything to this? And then you kind of quietly sit in the back and you watch it, and then maybe you approach the front a bit later. It's a question of seeking. If you're sincerely seeking, something happens. But if you're just trying to use religion for politics, it very quickly turns really toxic. I don't know. I wouldn't really want to judge people who are going to church for political reasons, because we all come with our own reasons and background, and we all want to impose our own stuff on the religion. I certainly did. But if you go and look for God in the place where God is being taught, it starts to change you. And then your shape starts to change. You start to see the world differently. That certainly started happening to me. It's still happening to me. And the more it happens, of course, the more you realize you don't know anything at all and you shouldn't be sitting on a stage talking about it, really. I think we should bring.
- [42:18]
B
We're going to bring the friar up
- [42:20]
C
here to answer these questions.
- [42:22]
B
I think there's so much of what you say that I feel resonates with me. I would say some of it doesn't, though. And I think one of the things that doesn't is there's a level of. I don't want to say despair, but sort of submission. The idea that the west is already dead. I read that sentence and I'm like, paul, like, what are you doing?
- [42:48]
C
I was provoking you on purpose. That's what I was doing.
- [42:51]
B
But I mean, talk to like. Because I think that's a kind of a choice. Is it basically a provocation? Or is it just a sincere observation of where you are? Or is it. Because I think you could say the west is sort of in a very challenging situation that is different than saying sort of it's dead. Which I think can lead people to a feeling of, well, then what's the point? What am I striving for?
- [43:19]
C
Well, when I'm talking about probably a different couple of different things I'm doing. So when I talk about the west being dead, when I use that term, the west, and I mean, I actually start the book with the question, what is this west everyone is currently fighting over what actually is.
- [43:31]
B
You say it's Christendom.
- [43:32]
C
Well, that's what it is. I mean, if you look at what the west is, the west is the culture that was previously medieval Christendom. It's Western Europe. What do all these Western European countries have in common? Not that much. In many ways, they're always fighting each other for about a thousand years. They have different languages, they have different cultures. The thing they have in common is they're all basically under the Roman Catholic Church, the Latin Church, that's the west, and then the colonies of Europe, including the United States and Canada and elsewhere, other west as well. And they are, I would say that the west is the thing that replaces Christendom. It's the sort of the Enlightenment liberal modern society that is nevertheless based on Christian values. There's no doubt about that. I mean, the constitution of this country is drawn up by people who assume that the country will be Christian and it won't be very easy to govern
- [44:16]
B
if it isn't, who also know their Hebrew Bible. But we can conversation for another time.
- [44:20]
C
Well, you know, it's not for Christians, but the values that inform it are not, you know, the values of atheism or something like that. They're assuming that there are a particular set of moral values which broadly come from Christianity that people will assume to be the case. Doesn't mean they have to be Christian to do so. But society is based on a set of values. So that's basically what the west is now.
- [44:43]
B
And you sort of say that we're living inside the ruins of it and people don't even recognize.
- [44:46]
C
Well, I think two things have happened, I think. Firstly, I think this is less true of America than it is of Europe, actually. Certainly Britain, where I come from, which is extremely irreligious country, possibly according to the stats that are out there, possibly the least religious country in the world. That's definitely not true of America, which is still very Christian in all sorts of ways and has plenty of other religions in it too. I would say America's still a pretty religious place compared to the rest of Western Europe. But in Western Europe we've basically, religion does not play a part in public life at all. People may still be religious, but they don't see it as A guidepost. So what I refer to as the west in the book, actually the conclusion I come to is that what we call the west now is actually this machine way of seeing. So what's happened is that we have confused a sort of cultural identity with this modern, rationalistic, mechanized, digital way of seeing, which we now think is the West. Right. Progress, growth, technological development, hooray for us. We can go to Mars, put chips in our brain. That's what the west does. We're rational and we progress. That's the thing that we think we are. Now, actually, we don't think we're Christian or even particularly liberal actually, or enlightenment people. I think we've kind of gone beyond Christianity people. We're progress people. We are progress people. So we've gone beyond Christianity. We're not sort of a Christian culture at all. I think we've also gone beyond sort of liberal enlightenment modernity as well. And we're in this technologically progressive thing. And the thing we believe in is the march of technological progress and science, which are supposed to solve everything. They will solve the environmental crisis, they will solve the cultural crisis. They will enable us to live forever. I think that that particular form of it's got a radically left brain thinking is what the west is. So in that sense, what the west was is already dead. We're not Christian anymore. I don't think we're even liberal anymore. So we are living in the ruins of something. It can sound depressing. I actually don't think it is depressing. I think it's a moment of renewal. I think that cultures and civilizations go through cycles. Things rise and fall. You can't go back to the 18th century, you can't go back to the 10th or whichever part of the world time you thought would be better. You can start here. And when things start to fall down, you have an opportunity to say, well, what actually is true and what actually is real? And where do I want to rebuild? Where do I want to restore things or protect things that are still here? Because there's plenty of good things still around. What do I want to rebuild from the ground up? And again we get back to the meaning crisis. Why are people going to church? Why are people coming to events like this? Why are people talking about this? Because there is a meaning crisis. There is a crisis of our culture. And it's a moment of. It's a turning, it's a shift because we're seeing now, with the rise of AI and the rise of digital tech, exactly where this is going to lead. Us. And so we can say, do we want this? And if we don't want this, what are the values that we want instead? So it is. It's a difficult moment in loads of ways because so much is crumbling. Nothing is around the whole world, nothing is secure, nothing is stable. But that's the kind of time where you can. Everything is stripped away so you could see things naked and you say, okay, what is real, what is true? What do I want to do? What I want for my country, what do I want for myself? And I think that's a hard time to live through, but also quite an exciting one.
- [47:52]
B
I think the reason that a lot of people would come to a night like this is because they are seeking maybe for many things, but among them really grasping for, you know, we can't live in another time. This is the time that we're living in. And in fact, I think many people here would say that a lot of the technologies that you can critique also have unbelievable benefits. But regardless, people are desperate. We are meaning machines. People want to live lives of meaning. So what can people. I know this is not necessarily a manual, this is an explanation of how we have arrived here, and I think a brilliant one. But people will want to know, how can we live a life of meaning? How can we maintain our humanness, our humanity in the age that we happen to be living in right now? Maybe short of becoming a monastic.
- [48:47]
C
Yeah, well, that's. You could do that. I mean, I clearly haven't done that myself, but you kind of do. Not really. I haven't got the beard.
- [48:53]
B
No. Okay, fine. But you go off into these seven day pilgrimages silent, you do it.
- [48:58]
C
I do do these kinds of things. That's my idea of a good time. But most people aren't as weird as me. But then I come back again and I sit in places like this and I've got a family. So we're all living in the world like you say. So we're living in the world and
- [49:10]
B
we're living in our time.
- [49:11]
C
We're living in this time. And this is the time we're made to live in. So you better get through it and you better just deal with it, girlfriend. As they say, I believe in these parts. So the last part of the book is where I try to work out what you could actually do about this. There's no five point plan to save the world because it doesn't work like that. But there are a number of ways you can think about how to live your life. We all live completely different lives. There's no manifesto for everybody, but the first thing to do is to start asking yourself what this story is. Hopefully this book is useful for this. You can read it, you can see what my story of the machine is. You can see if it's right or wrong. You might disagree with 90% of it, but it makes you think about what your story is and what the values of the time might be and whether you think they're the right ones. So you have to understand the story you're living in and the story that the people who are creating this age are telling us. And then you have to see if you've got a better story. If you don't like it, maybe you think everything's fine, which is, okay, great, then you don't have a meaning crisis. But if you do, if you think there's something missing, you have to say, well, what are the values that are missing? So to go back to those four P's that I came up with, people place prayer in the past. If they seem to have some sort of value, then how would you manifest that in your life? You know, what's your community of people? What's your sense of the past, your sense of history? How can you kind of live that? How can you honor your ancestors, pass things on to your children? How do you pray? What are you going to do about that? What do you think God is? If you think there's a God, and where are you going to go looking? And what's your sense of place? How much time do you spend in nature actually away from other people and cities and all the other things that surround us all the time? Do you have a sense of place even in a city? Do you have, like a community that you're part of, the things that actually root you down and give you meaning? And also, I think the big question today is what relationship you have with digital technology, especially, because it's just overwhelming us and washing over us. How are you going to draw lines? Do you have a phone? If so, do you need to use it all the time? What are you going to give to your children if you give them anything? Are you going to use an AI? Are you going to allow yourself to be sucked into this thing? Do you know what it's doing to you? Because if you don't set those lines, if you don't create your own relationship with the machine in that way, it will just swallow you up and it will push you on towards the goal it's moving towards, which is going to be the replacement of nature with Technology.
- [51:33]
B
In a previous life, you were a. There's an incredible New York Times Magazine profile about this period in your life. Well, sort of. It was an in between time. But you were a major environmental organizer.
- [51:45]
C
Well, I don't know about major, but I was.
- [51:47]
B
Well, you were.
- [51:48]
C
I was doing those things.
- [51:49]
B
Yeah, you were. And you were a big activist and you were sort of very much involved in what people would talk about as like creating new social norms, creating, like organizing as a community.
- [52:00]
A
And a lot of what you're writing
- [52:01]
B
about this book is more about like the individual choice. And I wonder if there's a more communal response that you think we should be having to living in this moment.
- [52:13]
C
Yeah, I mean, there's a whole chapter at the end which is called the Jellyfish Tribe, in which I came across this notion in a book by James C. Scott of this notion of a jellyfish tribe in which you can. Jellyfish are actually not biological. Detour. Jellyfish, it turns out, are actually not animals. They're tiny little communities of little things to get together to make what looks like a single creature. So I think it's really important if you feel that you want to change things, if this story has any resonance with you, if you want to try and live a more human scale life, to get together with other people, because it's very hard to do it on your own. And that is one thing the Internet is good for. It can bring you into contact with people who maybe are like you, but don't live in the same place. So it's possible to form communities, but it's also important to form communities and places where you actually are with your family and with your friends. I think that's already happening. I think it's happening in churches, I think it's happening in neighborhoods. I think it's happening when groups of teenage girls get together and chuck away their smartphones and get dumb phones instead, which is starting to happen more and more in all sorts of little ways. There are people standing up against this thing. I think we're at the point where we just have to question the story we're being told. And we're at a process of trying to work out what stories to write instead. It's a time for new stories probably based on old, very traditional stories that, you know, there's a lot of things about the traditional myths and stories and religions and folktales that we chucked away that turned out to have quite a lot of accumulated human wisdom in them. So I think the story of progress is hitting the buffers I think the story of the machine, even though the machine looks all conquering, is strangely weak and faltering because it actually doesn't have anything meaningful at its base. And so it's a time for different stories and so we have to work out what they are. And absolutely, it's a lot easier if you're in a community of other people. However, you can build that well.
- [54:01]
B
I want to thank Paul Kingsnorth for very interesting and provocative conversation and thank all of you so much for coming and for your thoughtful questions. Before you get up, Paul is going to be signing books. You should buy them. He might sound sort of like an anti capitalist, but trust me, he wants to sell books and he wants to sign them for you. I think there'll be coffee, tea, tea, refreshments. And once again, I want to thank this incredible community at Redeemer for hosting us and all of the staff, including all the people here, keeping us safe tonight. Paul Kingsnorth, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much.
- [54:35]
A
Thank you so much. Thanks for listening. If you liked this conversation or maybe you had the reaction, as a lot
- [54:45]
B
of people I love do, that Paul
- [54:47]
A
is wrong about everything and yet they were provoked by it. That's the point. Share this conversation with your friends and family and use it to have an honest conversation of your own. Last but not least, if you want to support honestly, there is just one way to do it. It's by going to the Free Press's website@thefp.com and becoming a subscriber today. Thanks and we'll see you next time.